Auction houses providing live auctions traditionally allow bidders to place live auction bids either in person or from remote locations, such as by telephone. Thus, in order to ensure consideration of the current highest bid, an auctioneer of a live auction must be aware of both incoming bids made by bidders who are on site with the auctioneer and incoming bids made by remote bidders who are off site from the auctioneer. The auctioneer can visually see and/or audibly hear bidders making onsite bids to ensure consideration of the bids. Conversely, the auctioneer cannot visually see or audibly hear offsite bidders making bids and must be made of aware of these offsite bids in some way other than visual and/or audible observation of the bidders. This notification of offsite bids traditionally involves a visual cue provided to the auctioneer, such as on a display screen visible to the auctioneer. However, in order to view the screen to scan for offsite bids, the auctioneer must repeatedly divert his/her attention from live bidders throughout the auctioning of every auction lot. Such repeated diversions of attention can be tiring for auctioneers and/or can result in lags of bidding acknowledgment while the auctioneer's attention is primarily devoted at any given moment to only one of onsite bidders and offsite bidders.
Accordingly, a need exists for improved auction bid notifications.